Abstract

This paper deals with institutional persistence in long-term economic development. We investigate the historical record of education in one of the fastest growing and most unequal societies in the twentieth century – the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Based on historical data from an agricultural census and education statistics, we assess the role played by factors such as land concentration, immigration and type of economic activity in determining supply and demand of education during the early twentieth century, and to what degree these factors help explain current educational performance and income levels. We find a positive and enduring effect of the presence of foreign-born immigrants on the supply of public instruction, as well as a negative effect of land concentration. Immigrant farm-laborers established their own community schools, and pressured for public funding for those schools or for public schools. The effects of early adoption of public instruction can be detected more than one hundred years later in the form of better test scores and higher income per capita. These results are suggestive of an additional mechanism generating inequality across regions: the places that received immigration from countries with an established public education system benefited from an earlier adoption of the revolutionary idea of public education.

Item Type:

MPRA Paper

Original Title:

Education Performance: Was It All Determined 100 Years Ago? Evidence From São Paulo, Brazil

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (2002), 1231-1294.

Engerman, Stanley L., and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies: A View from Economic Historians of the United States,” in How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800-1914, Stephen Haber, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Foerster, Robert F., The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1919).

Gallego, Francisco A., “Historical Origins of Schooling: The Role of Democracy and Political Decentralization,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 92(2010), 228-243.

Galor, Oded, Omer Moav, and Dietrich Vollrath, “Inequality in Landownership, the Emergence of Human-Capital Promoting Institutions and the Great Divergence,” The Review of Economic Studies, 76 (2009), 143-179.

Martínez-Fritscher, André Carlos, Aldo Musacchio, and Martina Viarengo, “The Great Leap Forward: The Political Economy of Education in Brazil, 1889-1930,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 10-075, 2010.